What Khan remembered first was the sound of the police cruiser’s engine revving before its driver accelerated into the crowd. Khan pulled out his cellphone to point himself out to me in the viral video: a man in a white shirt taking photographs a second before he’s sent flying several feet in the air, landing hard on his back.
I asked him what he thought of de Blasio’s defense of the police. “I was enraged,” Khan told me, calling the mayor’s reaction “forcefully oblivious” to the facts. “It really fuels that fire of being against the department, against the government,” he said.
Khan’s sentiments seemed to sum up all of New York’s: Although de Blasio recalibrated his comments the next morning, the uproar that ensued has been unlike any of the myriad controversies that have ensnared the mayor during his six and a half years leading the nation’s largest city. Hundreds of current and former de Blasio–administration employees—including some who worked in senior roles at City Hall— published an open letter railing against the mayor’s abandonment of police reform and warning that he was “on the brink of losing all legitimacy in the eyes of New Yorkers.” When de Blasio spoke later that week at a memorial for George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by Minneapolis police, the crowd drowned him out with boos and chants of “Resign!” Twisting the political knife, Governor Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat but longtime tormentor of the mayor, mused about using his authority to remove de Blasio from office after the city saw a night of heavy looting.
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